A guide to 16 upcoming productions
The Broadway season is about to kick into high gear with 14 new shows opening between now and the end of April, plus two big summer entries. Highlights include buzzed-about musicalizations of the movies Beetlejuice, Tootsie and Moulin Rouge; revivals of Oklahoma! and Kiss Me Kate; stars getting steamy in Burn This...

Why TV star Gbenga Akinnagbe's Broadway debut feels so personal and important
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Most wouldn't see a link between stone-cold killer Chris Partlow from HBO's The Wire, flashy pimp-turned-porn-star Larry Brown on HBO's The Deuce and Tom Robinson, a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in Broadway's To Kill a Mockingbird. But Gbenga Akinnagbe,...

How Be More Chill, The Prom and Dear Evan Hansen are attracting teens and young adults
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"A letter that was never meant to be seen, a lie that was never meant to be told, a life he never dreamed he could have." That mysterious message, used in the promotional materials for Dear Evan Hansen since its 2015 D.C. tryout, immediately captivated teenager...

Leah Nanako Winkler on her new play God Said This
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Leah Nanako Winkler started writing God Said This while keeping her cancer-stricken mother company during chemotherapy sessions in Kentucky. "It just came out," the playwright recalls -- though not all at once. Each week Winkler traveled between the Bluegrass State where she grew up and her current...

Well, Rent on Fox wasn't exactly live, but the show still went on, mostly using prerecorded footage from its dress rehearsal, which is when star Brennin Hunt broke his foot preventing him from participating in a live performance. During the first commercial break the entire cast, including Vanessa Hudgens, Brandon Victor Dixon, Jordan Fisher, Tinashe...

Two-time Tony nominee Johanna Day talks about starring in the nonlinear play Joan
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Last fall when Johanna Day's agent called her about doing Stephen Belber's new play Joan, she immediately shut him down. "I said, 'No, I'm not doing it, and don't send it to me because I know I'll like it because it's Stephen Belber,'" she recalls. A lauded stage...

Jessica Dickey on her world-premiere play The Convent
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The residents of The Convent, Jessica Dickey's new dark comedy at A.R.T./New York Theatres, aren't your typical nuns. In fact, most of them aren't nuns at all, but 21st-century women who have come to a feminist retreat in rural France seeking a fresh start. Some are coping with grief; others...

Grupo Corpo brings two startlingly different works to BAM
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Keeping a modern dance company alive and thriving for more than four decades is quite a feat -- especially in a city that isn't exactly an internationally renowned cultural center. Based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 200 miles north of Rio de Janeiro, Grupo Corpo was founded in 1975 by a group...